Summary: MadMAC: Building a Reconfigurable Radio
Testbed using Commodity 802.11 Hardware
Ashish Sharma, Mohit Tiwari, Haitao Zheng
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 U.S.A
Email: {asharma, tiwari, htzheng}@cs.ucsb.edu
Abstract-- Essential to adaptive devices is the ability to recon-
figure Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to environment
conditions and application requirements. We propose MadMAC,
a platform for building reconfigurable MAC protocols on com-
modity 802.11x hardware. Programming on top of MadWiFi,
MadMAC transmits packets at configurable time and frame for-
mat. In this paper, we build a TDMA-based MAC protocol using
MadMAC, and examine the impact of various design parameters.
Experimental results show that MadMAC allows flexible control
of protocol settings with small processing overhead. We also
observe that the TDMA MAC protocol provides 20% throughput
improvement over the CSMA protocol in a simple two-node
network.
I. INTRODUCTION